Creationism means never having to admit you know nothing, but you still get to pretend to be an expert

The core value of creation science is dishonesty. I was reminded of this yet again by an account by Todd Feeley of a RATE conference. RATE means “Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth”, and they are an excuse for creationist frauds to get together and spout off misleading pseudoscientific babble to a gullible audience. There’s always trouble when someone who is not gullible and actually knows something about a subject attends, as in this case. Feeley asks the organizer a question:

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Buy Tostitos Flour Tortilla Chips!

Commercials baffle me, but this one for Tostitos more than others. It’s a little trite, using the scenario of the little kid who asks “why?” to every explanation as a transparent excuse to drive exposition about why you should try their product, but it has an odd conclusion.

We’re all made from different DNA.
Why?
So we can adapt and survive.
OK!

It’s a bit clumsy, but there it is: biology used to sell snack food.

Why?

I know we evilutionists are a minority—why would there be a commercial to target such a narrow slice of the market? Could it be a test, to see if the ad generates a little buzz (I’m doing my part here, see!), or are they looking to see if they can tap into a market segment that is otherwise ignored? Maybe we need to have Mexican for dinner tonight.

What are you doing, Al?

Al Gore is generally a good guy, and I think his message on global warming is an important one. He’s still traveling around, giving his slideshow that we’ve seen in An Inconvenient Truth, but apparently he has added some new material — and these aren’t slides that make me very happy.

The slide I found particularly interesting/shocking/sad, was his new(?) slide containing a graph of human population growth over the past couple hundred-thousand years. It started off good. He pointed at the beginning of the graph, showing the population of humans on Earth from 200,000 years ago, and referred to the “rise of humans.”

Cool beans. So he believes that Homo sapiens evolved from other hominid ancestors, right? Nope. In the very same breath, he then continued to explain that according to his religious beliefs, this “rise of humans” was God’s creation of mankind — apparently 200,000 years ago. His graph then changed to include the caption “Adam & Eve” above this starting point.

Wha…?

He might as well have shown the chart of global temperature vs. number of pirates — it’s nonsense that completely undercuts the serious of the science he’s discussing.

It’s strange how this one little slide makes me far less enthusiastic about the prospect of another Gore run for the presidency. Even if he doesn’t actually believe in a literal creation event for mankind, he’s not above pandering to the ignorant.

Dang, I’m slipping

George Shollenberger is not happy with scienceblogs. He sent an email to the scienceblogs website (whatever that means) with a complaint:

I started to inform ‘the people’ on my website that our mathematicians are practicing atheism. Then, after I investigated the website, ScienceBlogs, I concluded that all sciences also practice atheism. So, my website is now informing ‘the people’ that mathematicians and scientists are practicing atheism.

However, I am dismayed to discover that the overwhelming godless influence on scienceblogs is not me, but Mark Chu-Carroll! I feel so inconsequential now, and clearly, Mark is better at driving men mad than I am.

We can’t pick on George too much, though … he reveals the true source of his problem.

However, by 1993 I experienced brain damage from a carotid artery blockage.

I’m sorry to hear that. To my shame, I still find this hilarious.

With my personal mind over body experience on my brain damage and my retirement in 1994, my attention shifted permanently to the theory of God and the sayings of Jesus Christ.

Not everyone can use brain damage to explain their religiosity.

My mutant superpower

It’s not what I would have picked if I had a choice, but it seems that my amazing mutant superpower is the ability to effortlessly drive people insane. I guess it’s not surprising that my talent would be both sinister and Lovecraftian, but I’d rather be able to fly or fire lasers out of my eyes — heck, even Aquaman’s powers would be kind of cool.

Ah, well … with great power comes great responsibility. Rather than afflicting innocent cognitive psychologists, who should I reduce to gibbering madness next? I tried doing a mind blast on Osama Bin Laden and GW Bush, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. My powers seem to be useless on most creationists, too. This is very disappointing!

Mazur, then Dawkins, with much driving between

I’m back! I had a long, busy day at a teaching conference, and got persuaded about a few things — I’m designing a new course for freshmen biology majors for the fall term (“Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development”, or FunGenEvoDevo for short), and I’ve been following the pedagogical ideas of Eric Mazur for a while, and this was my chance to go hear him. He said what I wanted to hear about getting basic concepts across to students, which is going to help a great deal in my summer project.

I got back too late to catch Dawkins on the O’Lielly show, though. My wife saw it, said it was good but short and without much of substance. Fortunately, One Good Move was quick on the draw. O’Reilly started right off with idiocy. He doesn’t know how tides work, so he’s got to believe in God. There was the usual weird right-wing history lesson — Hitler was an atheist, the Founding Fathers wanted a god-worshipping nation; of course, O’Reilly’s explanation for why they wanted a Christian nation was that it would pacify the people. Is it good framing to argue for religion because it is the opiate of the masses?

I thought Dawkins was calm, relaxed, and treated the bozo lightly and with good humor. O’Reilly threw out that softball inanity right at the beginning, and you can almost see Dawkins crack up at the clown.

Tomorrow is my day at home before I make my Boston blitz — I might be able to squeeze in a few posts here, along with getting a pile of other work done.